Born to play

DON CAMPBELL, Ottawa Citizen11.07.2012

Despite a history of dominating almost every sport he’s tried, Sean Monahan doesn’t display even the slightest hint of arrogance. His shyness growing up resulted in indifference to his own accomplishments. “If I scored a bunch of goals, I would just put my head down and come off.” (Cole Burston/Ottawa Citizen)Cole Burston
/ Ottawa Citizen

As a three-year-old skating in his first season of organized hockey in Brampton, Sean Monahan invented every possible excuse to get his father John to stay with him on the bench.

In what should have been a sign of things to come, Monahan’s mother Cathy remembers how creative her son was even then.

“Sean was so shy that he always wanted his dad coaching, and in order to get his dad to stay on the bench and coach, he would tell his dad that part of his equipment felt “weird,” like his helmet was too tight or his elbow pads felt funny, and one of the most memorable, the ice was ‘too slippery,’” says Cathy Monahan. “Sean struggled the entire year with his shyness, but was excited to go to each game because he loved the game.”

While sports came easy for the current Ottawa 67’s star, the shyness stuck for years, and nobody could really figure out why he was so short on self-confidence.

As a youngster, Monahan could pick up a lacrosse stick with the Brampton Excelsiors and score the maximum goals allowed for any one player in a game before the teams switched ends.

He could walk into the gym at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Brampton at noon hour, find himself in a game of 21 with some of the hotshots on the senior basketball team, and reel off 15 straight free throws to win.

He could bust moves on a skateboard that made the experts stop and marvel.

Or, with Gabriel Venezuela on his right wing and best friend Mike Kussman on his left, take over a game no matter who the Brampton Battalion were facing.

“A lot of people talk about how clutch he is now,” says Kussman. “He’s had the ability to put a team on his back all his life.

“At six years old he scored to overtime goal for us to upset the Toronto Marlies. In lacrosse, he was always to go-to guy for goals. He was (good for) six goals every game.

“One time he said, ‘let’s enter a beach volleyball tournament in Dufferin-Peel.’ Me and him won the tournament. Everything he did, he was good at.”

The only thing Monahan never got good at was relishing his accomplishments. What he did might have been a big deal to others. It never was for him.

“I don’t know what it was,” said Monahan, who just turned 18. “I wouldn’t want to go on the ice, or the floor. Or if I scored a bunch of goals I would just put my head down and come off.

“Even in class, I would know the answer to the teacher’s question and be too shy to put my hand up. It was just something with me.”

Basically, the only thing he was never shy on was talent and creativity. His sports IQ is off the charts.

It was there through minor hockey and was evident on the world stage at both the World U17 and U18 and last summer’s Canada/Russia challenge. Now, it’s on to scrutiny in the next few weeks for a spot on this year’s Canadian junior team.

That’s why his name is mentioned in the same breath as American Seth Jones and Halifax Moosehead Nathan McKinnon during discussions about potential top three picks at next June’s NHL draft.

It just doesn’t seem that long ago that he was growing up on Glenforest Road in Brampton. He had three idols as a boy: His late “poppy” Will, his father, a sheet metalist by trade, and Steve Yzerman.

Monahan would religiously shoot 16 buckets of pucks every day in the back yard, and the wooden fence behind it took a beating whenever he missed (slats were constantly being replaced). On occasion, he did damage to neighbour’s houses with shots off the cross-bar, though they never complained and always threw the pucks back.

He also developed a keen sense of humour and exhibits it when he can through pranks. Kussman was often the victim.

Every single day, Kussman would walk to Monahan’s house before school and “too often” Monahan would somehow hide his pal’s backpack and let his friend get to school without his homework.

One day in Grade Nine, the two were sitting side-by-side in the first week of class, nervous about trying to fit in.

“All I was trying to do was impress the teacher, and Sean turned and said ‘can I borrow your phone?’” said Kussman. ‘“So I gave it to him. And he gave it back.

“The next thing I know a ring tone is going off in our class and it’s Taylor Swift with some girlie tune (It’s a Love Story) going off full blast, and I find out it’s my phone! He had switched my ring tone, cranked the volume, then called me.”

The following year, the dynamic duo were in biology class, dissecting the eye of a cow. Kussman, naturally, was doing all the dissecting, and failed to notice Monahan was taking tweezers and filling his victim’s pockets with all the waste.

The pair got the cafeteria and, when Kussman reached for his lunch money, all he got was a handful of squishy membranes and the like.

It’s that kind of ‘IQ’ that Monahan carries to the ice. It’s a little bit genius-like. He’s the type of player 67’s coach and general manager Chris Byrne wishes he had a room full of.

One longtime NHL scout compares Monahan to Mike Richards, a Stanley Cup winner last year with the Los Angeles Kings. Longtime 67’s observers might compare him to ex-67 Andrew Cassels.

Like Cassels, Monahan makes teammates around him better and has gone head-to-head with the league’s best 19-year-olds since his second year. And in a season where the 67’s don’t really have any true first-line wingers, Monahan still finds himself among the top 10 in league scoring.

“He’s a great player and playing with him last year was a lot of fun,” says former linemate Tyler Toffoli, now a Manchester Monarch. “We were always roommates and one night someone set our alarm clock for 3 a.m. So it went off in the middle of the night and it scared us both.

“But as soon as it went off, he picked it up and threw it against the wall and it broke. But we both forgot until we woke up in the morning and saw the clock smashed into pieces.”

If nothing else, Monahan is also extremely superstitious, especially with equipment. He hates new equipment worse than a trip to the dentist’s office, and he doesn’t like dentists at all.

Unlike most kids, who always want the latest gear, Monahan would get his mother to stitch his old equipment together until no amount of stitching could save it.

Now 67’s equipment manager Chris Hamilton has to deal with it.

“He won’t wear new shoes, jock shorts, skates, anything,” said Hamilton. “He believes there are still goals remaining in what he has.

“Last season we pranked him before a practice. He had been bugging and bugging to get him Bauer sticks. We kept saying we can’t due to our stick contract, But we had ordered him the sticks. They arrived before a practice one day and Byrnie had been in on the joke. So while the boys were stretching, Byrnie came out with the new stick and did a whole awards ceremony in front of the boys.

“Then last week he had a dream that he scored an OT winner with a different stick and now he is bugging me to get him that stick.”

If Monahan has a best friend on the team, it has to be the diminutive Brett Gustavsen, around whom there is never a dull moment.

The two live together with Dan and Allison Cowan as their billets, and nothing’s been the same at the Cowan household since the pair moved in three seasons ago.

For starters, nobody in the house dares handle the bathroom doorknob without checking for a foreign substance first.

Gustavsen is also no-one’s fool, but he has to keep an eye open at all times around Monahan.

He still remembers his head hitting the pillow late one night and wondering ‘what the (expletive)’ after pulling a dumbbell out of the pillowcase, the weight placed there by Monahan.

“You have to always be aware of him around the house,” said the victim.

The two go all the way back to major peewee, and Gustavsen remembers Monahan arriving at Rebels tryouts, having been cut by the North York Rangers.

“Knowing Moni now, he didn’t even care that he’d just been cut,” said Gustavsen. “All he wanted was to just play hockey.

“But we all saw quickly all the talents he has, and he sure showed he was one of the ‘big’ players around.”

Monahan remembers what it’s like to be a rookie, having to clean the bus at the end of a long road trip when school is just hours away. He has never skipped a class because the bus arrived too late for him to get up. He also knows what it’s like if the veterans don’t make the younger players feel part of it.

”What he is normal,” said Gustavsen. “Lots of guys have egos. You see lots of superstars get full of themselves. He is not that.